This special topic page is called “Wide Format,” but if you have been paying attention, you may have noticed that a lot of what gets covered here isn’t necessarily “wide” per se, but rather falls into the much broader topic of “specialty printing.” Historically, the term “specialty printing” has referred to a unique niche in the printing industry known as “ad specialties.” The Ad Specialties Institute (ASI) defines these items as “low-cost, high-return promotional products, or ad specialties...usually given away for free by companies, schools, hospitals, sports teams, organizations and more to advertise a brand or event or to thank employees or clients.” We sometimes call these promotional merchandise, or perhaps widgets or doodads, or even tschotchkes.

Look around your home or office (or your home office) and you’ll turn up any number of these kinds of items: pens, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, golf balls, and so on. Today, we can identify even more items that fall into this category: thumb drives (after any trade show, I have enough custom-printed thumb drives it seems to store all of human civilization’s collected knowledge), smartphone cases, even “power banks,” those rechargeable batteries used to top up mobile devices.  

Traditional ad specialties had (and largely still have) a somewhat complex supply chain. Say ConglomCo Industries is holding a customer event at which they want to give away some branded products. They would contact a distributor with whom they would work to determine the items they think would be most effective—maybe pens, golf balls, keychains, T-shirts, whatever the case may be (it could even be a smartphone case...). The distributor then contacts a supplier who is essentially the printer of the product. If it’s a pen, the distributor gets in touch with a pen supplier. The pen supplier is then the one who does the customized printing/imaging, and may also be ordering blank pens from a manufacturer of the actual pens, although the supplier may also be the manufacturer.